Australian Antarctic Division: Leading Australia’s Antarctic Program

Antarctic video gallery

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Aleks Terauds

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Aleks Terauds

Video transcript

I’m a spatial ecologist at the Australian Antarctic Division and I run a small section called biodiversity conservation, where we try and do research into environmental protection and achieving conservation outcomes for Antarctica.

The research looks at things like the vulnerability of biodiversity, what drives biodiversity, what are the linkages between the things that live in Antarctica and the physical environment; and then using that information to try and better understand what threatens the biodiversity of Antarctica and how we can mitigate those threats into the future.

The biggest threats to Antarctica are quite clearly things around climate change. But also human activity is by far and away another major threat in Antarctica.

So what we try and do in our research team is develop ideas around how we can mitigate those threats and actually put them into a format that then the Antarctic Treaty parties can understand and then make decisions to better protect or better manage the biodiversity that are under their remit.

What I really love about my work is the fact that we can make a difference, so myself and my research team have done quite a range of research that feeds directly into the Antarctic Treaty and has actually changed the way people operate and manage life in Antarctica, and I think that’s really important and that makes me really happy.

Krill swarms in 3D

Krill swarms in 3D

Video transcript

On-screen text: In the Southern Ocean, scientists are finding krill by following the blue whales that eat them.

ROB KING: It's fascinating to be on a voyage where we're targeting areas to research by focusing in on blue whales that we're hearing from hundreds of kilometres across the ocean.

On-screen text: For the first time, the RV Investigator's echosounders are being used to 'see' giant krill swarms underwater.

JOSH LAWRENCE: So the animation is showing us a three-dimensional representation a large krill swarm we passed over earlier in the voyage. The swarm was about 400 metres long by about 200 metres across and it kind of came up in this multi-level swarm that was a total depth range of about 100 metres, but with the three-dimensional view you can see that it's all connected and it's all one enormous swarm.

On-screen text: With a volume of a million cubic metres, this single swarm contains hundreds of millions of Antarctic krill.

ROB KING: What sort of krill is a blue whale after? Because krill isn't just an individual. Krill is a super organism.

JOSH LAWRENCE: It might tell us something about the preferences that the whales have for the different three-dimensional structures. Again, that's something you wouldn't really be able to do without that three-dimensional information.

On-screen text: Each swarm recorded by the echosounders is also sampled for its krill.

ROB KING: There's a whole bunch of female krill here that are ready to lay eggs. There's also a lot of developing juvenile krill that are maturing. But what's really interesting is that those krill are mainly females so it appears there's a strong gender imbalance in this area. It's not preventing them producing fertilised eggs. All of the females that have spawned here in the lab have produced fertilised eggs that have gone on to produce embryos, no trouble at all. So the system is working but we're not sure where the males are, so we're going to be looking for those as the cruise continues.

Scientists of the Antarctic: Mr Tim Spedding

Scientists of the Antarctic: Mr Tim Spedding

Video transcript

I’ve spent approximately eight summers in the Antarctic, and I loved that experience.

I also really love the work because it does have real tangible environmental improvements.

So I lead a team of multidisciplinary scientists and engineers, looking at and assessing the human impacts in the Antarctic and this is primarily around contaminants, fuels and heavy metals.

Remediation in the environmental context means the improvement of soil or water back towards its original state.

The reason we need to remediate sites in Antarctica is that, as part of the Antarctic Treaty, all nations that work down there have an obligation to clean up their waste disposal sites and minimise their environmental impact.

There are lots of technologies in the world that have been used in temperate conditions but have never been applied to the Antarctic, and our role is taking these technologies, modifying these technologies, and assessing if they can work to clean up contaminated sites in the Antarctic.

One remediation technology that we are very familiar with is bioremediation, which is using the natural or the native microorganisms in the soil, in Antarctica, to degrade fuel.

Ultimately our aim for our research is to be used by other nations. They’ll take our information and they’ll be able to make informed decisions to remediate and clean up contaminated sites around their stations.

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Jess Melbourne-Thomas

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Jess Melbourne-Thomas

Video transcript

I think the main thing I love about the work that I do is the challenge.

In my work I use field observations, ecosystem science and also mathematical models to understand and help manage risks for Antarctic marine biota, so particularly the effects of climate change and fisheries on Southern Ocean ecosystems.

You know these are really big questions and they’re urgent questions and I find that exciting.

The research that I do and that my group is involved with delivers into forums like CCAMLR, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, to inform the decisions they make on a year to year basis around managing fisheries and the conservation of dependent species like penguins and seals.

But it also delivers into some of the more global policy environments and bodies like the IPCC which is the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.

I think being in the field and experiencing the Antarctic environment is really important in terms of understanding the scale of these systems and the isolation and even just the effort that goes into collecting every piece of data that we use to inform the models. So I think that’s a really important part of being an Antarctic scientist and a modeller is to experience the environment itself.

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Bruce Deagle

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Bruce Deagle

Video transcript

My role at the Australian Antarctic Division is a molecular ecologist, so I lead a small group of geneticists who do research on the ecology of organisms in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

A lot of the things we’re doing are brand new, so people have never seen these sorts of data before. And the ability to really answer questions that nobody else has been able to address before is quite exciting.

So the type of work that we do ranges from things like looking at penguin diet using DNA markers to characterise prey that we get in faecal samples, so in scat samples, to looking at communities of microscopic organisms that are found in seawater.

Just recently started working on a collaboration with international scientists to get a whole bunch of different countries and different Antarctic stations collecting poo samples from Adélie penguins to start doing a larger project on the diet of the species all around Antarctica.

I think more generally genetics will be used in the future to do a lot of the monitoring work that we right now use a microscope to do and I think that’s a really bright area for genetics research.

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Catherine King

Scientists of the Antarctic: Dr Catherine King

Video transcript

Wherever there’s humans and human activities there’s the risk of contamination and impacts for the environment. So in Antarctica this could be legacy wast tip sites, wastewater discharges from our stations, or accidental fuel spills.

My research includes field assessments as well as laboratory experiments to look at the sensitivity and the vulnerability of Antarctic animals and plants to a range of contaminants and environmental stressors.

We hope that the protocols and the methods we develop, and the recommendations we make, are taken up by other Antarctic Treaty nations.

This work is hugely important on a global scale to maintain the biodiversity and the integrity of Antarctica as the last great wilderness on Earth. And also to ensure that our ongoing presence in Antarctica has minimal effects on the environment there.

I get to conduct field work in Antarctica which is in my opinion the most special place on Earth. So that’s probably what drives me, the environment there, the wilderness, the penguins, my favourite animals, as well as the tight, close-knit community and the friendships that are formed there that are enduring and everlasting.